The town-hall debate

The utterly useless Benghazi argument

DAVE WEIGEL thinks Mitt Romney muffed a big chance in the most talked-about exchange in yesterday's debate, when a questioner asked Barack Obama why there hadn't been a response to requests by the Benghazi consulate for heavier security in the days before it was attacked. But Dave Weigel is wrong: there was no big chance to muff. The reason Mr Romney couldn't make hay out of the Benghazi argument is that the argument is a confused mess. The people who are making it don't understand what point they're trying to make, so it's not surprising that audiences don't tend to understand it either.

As Mr Weigel says, Mr Obama's initial response to the question was the stock answer he's been giving for weeks: the United States is investigating the attack and will identify the perpetrators and hunt them down. But he thinks Mr Romney then blew an opportunity to do what Republicans have been trying to do for weeks, ie, turn the attacks into Mr Obama's version of Jimmy Carter's Iranian hostage crisis.

Romney rose and ambled slowly toward an answer. “I—I think the president just said correctly that—that the buck does stop at his desk,” he said, “and—and he takes responsibility for—for that—for that—the failure in providing those security resources, and those terrible things may well happen from time to time.” He didn’t point out, as he could have, that the commander-in-chief had just dodged Ladka’s question. He said that Obama’s decision to proceed with a Sept. 12 fundraiser had “symbolic significance, and perhaps even material significance.”

Obama was ready for this, too. “The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden, and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror.”

Mr Romney then prepared to claim that Mr Obama hadn't called the attack an act of terror; Mr Obama dryly fended off Mr Romney's claim, and moderator Candy Crowley shut Mr Romney down by stating that Mr Obama had in fact referred to them as acts of terror. Point to Mr Obama. Mr Weigel chides Mr Romney for failing to connect the question to the overarching Republican narrative: the "cannonades of questions and documents and witnesses and punditry and timelines [that have] formed into a glowing radioactive gruel, 'Benghazi-gate,' in which the administration was simply hapless and ignorant and unable to say that terrorism exists."

I think that by the time you get to the end of Mr Weigel's sentence here, you should realise that the problem isn't so much with Mitt Romney's delivery yesterday as with the argument itself. Specifically, it's incomprehensible. What on earth would it mean to claim that the Obama administration is unable to say that terrorism exists? Who do Republicans believe the administration thinks it is killing when it approves drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen? What exactly is it that Republicans are trying to say about the attacks in Benghazi? Are we to believe that Democrats are predisposed to blaming terror on spontaneous mobs of Muslim zealots, as opposed to more organised groups of the same? Putting aside the shoddiness of such an analysis, what sort of indictment of the administration is that supposed to imply, in Republican eyes?

What Republicans want to argue is that the inadequate security at the Benghazi consulate, and the statements by the administration that the attack was connected to mass demonstrations against the YouTube clips, prove that Mr Obama is too "soft", whatever that might mean in the currently available context. One reason this case is so hard to make is that America had a consulate in Benghazi as a result of Mr Obama's rather "hard" decision to launch an air war there in support of an indigenous popular revolution and drive Muammar Qaddafi from power. More significant is that the analytical question of whether attacks on American institutions reflect broad religiously motivated anti-Americanism in the Muslim world or are the acts of small terrorist groups is hard to place on a "soft v hard" partisan or ideological grid. It's generally conservative Republicans who want to claim that Islamic extremism is a major geopolitical threat; yet when Republicans argue that the attack in Benghazi was a pre-planned operation by an Islamist terrorist organisation and that the administration was wrong to connect it to mass popular demonstrations against the YouTube clips, they are arguing that the administration is too worried about Islamic extremism. The implications of this argument in terms of softness or hardness are just confusing.

Take the piece by Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, to which Mr Weigel links. Mr Hayden's case is that the Obama administration's belief that the Benghazi attack reflected spontaneous anger over the YouTube clips reflects its "wishful thinking" on terror. Huh? How is the idea that huge numbers of Libyans are anti-American religious zealots prepared to storm our consulates and kill our diplomats over a YouTube clip supposed to constitute "wishful thinking"? The more evidence arises that Benghazi was just a garden-variety terrorist attack on a consulate like those we've seen since the 1990s, the more the administration seems if anything guilty of being too pessimistic. Mr Hayden then argues the administration was guilty of "wishful thinking" when it intervened against Mr Qaddafi, given the subsequent power vacuum in Libya and the rising power of miiitias and foreign-funded extremist groups. Does he think Mr Qaddafi would have survived without the American intervention? Would that have been better for American interests? How about for Libyan citizens? If Mr Qaddafi would have fallen anyway, what is Mr Hayden's point? He doesn't explain; and obviously if the Republican argument rests on the idea that we should have let Muammar Qaddafi slaughter the citizens of Benghazi in February 2011, it's going to be hard for Mr Romney to score points in debates.

There is really just one concrete issue here: security at the Benghazi consulate proved inadequate, and the administration bears responsibility for that. There's a difficult trade-off to be made between protecting diplomats and turning every American institution abroad into a guarded fortress isolated from popular contact (which has already largely happened over the past 15 years). But there doesn't seem to be much ideological valence to that problem. This just isn't the Iranian hostage crisis. The reason Mitt Romney couldn't make a strong partisan argument out of Benghazi at the debate is that it's basically impossible to make a strong partisan argument out of Benghazi.

Which isn't to say that the argument is not, in its own way, significant. Way deep down, deep in the subconscious of this argument, something of importance is hiding. It has to do with the "us-them" framework we build to classify friends and enemies, and the ambivalent way we think when we assign agency, responsibility and legitimacy to potential enemy groups. To say that an action by a group is "spontaneous" is usually to grant it implied legitimacy: this was not pre-planned, so it reflects the group's true feelings. The word "terrorist", meanwhile, is often used the way "outside agitator" was used in the Jim Crow South, to deny legitimacy to acts of protest or political violence. In fact, these words are misleading. The groups that attacked our consulate in Benghazi could be terrorist organisations and still enjoy popular support and political strength, as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Mahdi Army and the Israeli-Jewish Irgun have at various times. (They seem instead to be smaller players who are trying to establish their credentials through violent attacks on out-group targets, a familiar and often successful strategy which we may yet be able to avoid in Libya.) On the other hand, demonstrations can be "spontaneous" and therefore weak or irrelevant, ungrounded in any organisation with staying power; this is why Americans' hopes for colour revolutions that supposedly express "the will of the people" are so often disappointed. (Hegel's line about "confused notions based on the wild idea of the 'people'" is apposite here.)

So to some extent Mr Romney's fumbling over the Benghazi issue grows out of Americans' deep confusion over how to reconcile the potentially anti-American elements in the Arab-spring revolutions with our "us-them" framework. Republicans want to cast Mr Obama as the weak leader who endangers the group by refusing to recognise that "they" are enemies. But who are "they"? To say that the attack was not spontaneous or popular, but was a pre-planned terrorist operation, is to say that "they" are only small terrorist groups, while the Libyan or more generally Arab masses are not necessarily hostile. That sounds like an argument for the current administration's foreign policy, not against it. Basically, Americans can't figure out a coherent way to divide "us" and "them" in the post-Arab-spring Middle East. Republican and Democratic politicians can't either. This is a good thing! It leaves room for rational discourse, or ought to. But it makes it very hard for Mitt Romney to shape a good line of attack in foreign-policy debates.

So were all those Sept 11th demonstrations over that stupid YouTube video or were they part of a more general anti-American demonstration planned for Sept 11th? At the time, it seemed almost implausible that the Sept 11th demonstrations had much to do with that cheesy video, yet that's what we were told. When the administration finally said the 9/11 attack had been premeditated and not about the silly video, it seemed as if they were finally admitting what most people (and some conservative pundits) had already reasoned was the real likely scenario.

So as the narrative played out, it seemed as if either the state department was lying (for whatever reason) or the "intelligence community" had less intelligence than The Drudge Report. Yet you are correct that it is impossible to make a coherent political attack against it, because quickness and wrongness of the intelligence community to pronounce the 9/11 attacks as something they weren't mainly just seems weird.

So were all those demonstrations really about the video or weren't they? We still don't know anything. I just wish the government and the media would just say they don't know when they don't know rather than jumping to stupid conclusions about the reasons for things. It just makes us not trust you or like you as much.

So is reporter Lara Logan lying too? I think too many on the left are trying to hypothesize and analyze, when it's black and white. Islamic extremists want everyone who is not Muslim to die. 1+1=2. If American reporters who spend hours blathering about the 'right wing conspiracies' take the time to educuate themselves from people who have actually LIVED in these cultures, they would understand, there is no political divisiveness going on. There is AMERICAN vs. JIHADIST going on all around the globe. Don't believe the 'Republican lies'? Fine, then go ask Lara Logan or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Or, act like they don't exist either, because the mainstream media sure does a good job of ignoring their messages. Stick your fingers in your ears, and perhaps in 10-20 years we can all embrace car bombings and terror within our neighborhoods as a way of life, kind of like Lebanon. It won't be a political issue then, it will come down to 'us vs. them', and what are you going to do? Negotiate with a man or woman who has been raised to think you and your demon spawn need eliminated, and happens to have a bomb strapped to their back? http://worldswisestman.com/2012/10/benghazi-seals-went-to-die-panetta-an...

Miss,
Your link refers to al-Zawahri commending the attacks, without offering the reason for them. There have indeed been reports, though, which claim a relatively small terrorist group organized the attack in order to gain notoriety, respond to the video, and celebrate 9/11, but as far as I know these have not been confirmed. It will be interesting if claims that the video was among the motivations for the attack prove true, especially if this is on the basis of old intelligence. Perhaps it is unjust to expect an immediate baring of the facts when some details are still murky, but the political climate has been very unkind to Mr. Obama's lack of such openness and detail.

But the attackers, recognized as members of a local militant group called Ansar al-Shariah, did tell bystanders that they were attacking the compound because they were angry about the video. They did not mention the Sept. 11 anniversary. Intelligence officials believe that planning for the attack probably began only a few hours before it took place.

and for those who say that Obama failed because of lack of security....

This is what RSO Eric Nordstrom said…..

“The ferocity and intensity of the attack was nothing that we had seen in Libya, or that I had seen in my time in the Diplomatic Security Service. Having an extra foot of wall, or an extra-half dozen guards or agents would not have enabled us to respond to that kind of assault”

an informative blog for anyone who REALLY wants to learn about Foreign Service Officers such as Diplomats and such....

DiploPundit wades into leadership and management issues, realities of Foreign Service life, ambassadors and nominations, embassy report cards, current events in countries and regions which may or may not include prominent U.S. interests, and other developments in the international affairs community

President Obama and Candy Crawly both said that the attack on the consulate in Benghazi was an act of terror. The President wins the point on style, but shouldn't the facts matter. I can't find where in the transcript of the Rose Garden remarks the attack in Benghazi is called an act of terror. Am I mistaken?

"Mr Weigel chides Mr Romney for failing to connect the question to the overarching Republican narrative: the "cannonades of questions and documents and witnesses and punditry and timelines [that have] formed into a glowing radioactive gruel, 'Benghazi-gate,' in which the administration was simply hapless and ignorant and unable to say that terrorism exists."

The narrative might be wrong, or muddled, but the radioactive gruel is still out there. Has anyone tuned in to CNN lately? Regular people go by their guts. What they see is a security lapse. When told that diplomacy cannot be conducted from bunkers, Mr. Ladka and countless others like him wonder "Why not?" The argument may not help Republicans, but the issue sure does.

This is a classic case of ; ''you live by the sword ,you die by the sword.'' ... the diplomats in this case not only where they instrumental in the killings and violence in Libya but they were busy orchestrating even a bigger mayhem in this country, what would they be doing in Banghezi, they were supposed to be in Tripoli, the capital city. Anyhow, may their souls rest in peace. It should be a lesson to everyone else that , what goes round comes round.

There were riots in two dozen cities across the Arab world in response to the "obscure" YouTube video. An American school was burned, embassies and consulates attacked, KFC got to fill in for the great satan if no other target was available. And now this didn't happen?

I'm willing to believe there was no larger protest in Benghazi.* I am not willing to believe the protests in Cairo and Yemen and etc did not actually take place in this new version of reality. I'm glad it calmed down, I'd like to know why, but it DID ACTUALLY HAPPEN.

I swear the neo-cons are back, with this insistence that reality--riots in dozens of places by people who say they are enraged over a blasphemous video, the phrase "acts of terror" used on 9/12--could not have happened that way because it does not confirm to their current preferences.

*(Though the perpetrators stated straight up, to reporters at the scene, that they were there because they were angry about the Youtube video and its assault on the prophet.)

Sir,
You seem to miscomprehend the point about the video. It was not of the sort that would play on TV in this country; I believe it has only been broadcast (in part) in Egypt. It was instead posted on YouTube, and there have been genuine riots in Islamic countries sparked by it. It was out of concern for this video that Mr. Obama felt the need to express an opposition to anything disrespectful of other religions near the beginning of his speech. It was this video that other white house officials told us inspired the (nonexistent) riot from which the attacks in Libya supposedly sprouted.

Mr. Obama did make reference to "acts of terror." That is in the transcript. He also carefully did not identify the attack in Libya as an act of terror until two weeks later, rather than correcting his administration's official stance. The reason for which he did this is unclear, and may have been to allow intelligence operations to work with less attention. If this was necessary, it was very politically convenient for him to allow the 9/11 attacks to be associated with radicals in America, and that is why people attack him.

We remember and commemorate the day we were attacked. The Japanese remember and commemorate the day they were attacked.

I don't know why you think there is utter bullshit in that, other than some odd urge to impute a whole ton of beliefs to me because I mentioned two historic dates. I don't say a damn thing about which was worse, or how I feel about nuclear weapons vs death by conventional firebombing. You were forced to make those parts up out of whole cloth and pre-existing indignation.

People remember the date on which they were attacked. That is what reverberates in memory, and means a great deal to the people to which it happened and much less to anyone outside.

Well, overall you have a bunch of young men with poor employment prospects (50% unemployment amongst Egyptian males in their 20s is what I remember?) and a history of America backing strongmen with no regard for how they treated their citizens for many decades, and a whole history in the region of stuff some of which is our fault and some of which isn't, and an easy go-to rile 'em upper amongst the radical clerics of blaming the US as a great powerful foreign place which disrespects them and their religion. (Thus the tradition of having these things after Friday prayers, when everyone's off work and leaving the mosque.) "We need an outside enemy!" is a pretty common rallying measure when your people are discontent. So the YouTube video is just the latest spark to very dry tinder, one more flashpoint.
And it happened with the Danish cartoons. That seemed a stunningly ridiculous thing to burn Danish embassies and consulates over, but there were the mobs.
The video was on YouTube in English for several months. What made it take off was translation into Arabic (really wonder if that was the filmmakers or some Islamist group) and then airtime with the Egyptian equivalents of Rush Limbaugh, shock jocks who do shows about how everyone should be riled up and angry at the latest Terrible Thing.
My son watched the 'Charlie bit my finger' video at least 30 times when he was 9. I have no idea what makes some YouTube videos take off, but in some ways it is the transparent ridiculousness of this one that makes me think it is legit: Someone trying to gin something up would come up with a decent plot, something involving arms shipments and CIA black ops oppression or something, not a really awful overdubbed sand and sandals epic. I just don't see how "We want mobs in two dozen countries to get really mad about a terrible YouTube video, in unison" is something someone could organize. (If the mobs actually were organized, they should have accomplished a lot more than killing one ambassador who wasn't even in his embassy.)
According to the NYTimes story AaS had some months earlier announced their intention to attack the Benghazi consulate. (Which is another part of the whole intelligence/security issue.) That "now, as the whole Arab world rises against the evil influence of the West!!!!!" struck them as a great time makes a certain sense. Kind of embarrassing if you're late to the revolution, and who knew then it would peter out and turn the local populace even more against AaS, when they were supposed to cheer and come over to support AaS after this show of boldness?

"Which date do you know, the date the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor or the date we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?"
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This is utter bullshit... you know, big pile of shit. (No excuses this time, moderator).
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Pearl Harbor happened during intensive talks on non-aggression pact between Japan and the US, which was widely expected to be signed by the negotiating parties in a week or two.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the conclusion of a war ignited by Pearl Harbor which took away millions of lives, either through mass murders like Nanking Massacre (200 000 slaughtered by bayonets) or Japanese extermination camps (Burma, Malaya) - on top of usual war casualties. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were awful lesson, but they prevented more of Nankings and camps (16 in Taiwan, 8 in the Philippines, 6 in Malaya/Singapore, 18 in Dutch East Indias... and about twenty more scattered around).

Debate Moderator Candy Crowley: Romney Was Actually Right On Libya
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CNN’s Candy Crowley admits that Romney was actually right during the debate on the Libya remark (October 16, 2012 - CNN Live).
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This piece of video is all over the net.

Except we aren't talking about rioters throwing rocks and bottles. We are talking about an armed militia with automatic weapons.

I happen to think that the administration did not do a bad job over the incident. But one thing that was not a threat was a popular riot with martyrs. The popular position in Libya, as events after the attack showed, is far more pro-Amnerican than the general image of Arab countries would lead one to expect. In this case (helping throw out Qaddaffi), there is no real question that the Obama administration got it right.